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Not sure if this is the right place for this report. I just realized that I've never successfully navigated to the Mailing Lists page, and instead always searched for it. I expected it to be in the navigation bar of Community: http://www.eclipse.org/community/
The problem with the old website was a prominent link to the mailing lists page. The mailing lists at eclipse.org are mainly targeted at committers. Thus, new users should not land on a mailing list at first.
I see your point. That's not the case for all projects (e.g. AspectJ, which has a prominent users list), but projects can advertise their own mailing lists accordingly. But note that both projects and Eclipse have announce/news lists, and these are of interest to users. So in my opinion they are still too hidden though. You could link them from Community (maybe under Getting involved) and just be clear that Newsgroups are the primary way for users to interact.
I believe the best solution for project resources is to list them on their respective project pages. I believe Bjorn is working towards this - project downloads, project docs, project bugs, project groups, etc. The main downloads page - downloads by project is just such a big page that it's virtually useless - and same for the newsgroups by project and mailing lists by project. The specific problem with mailing lists is that, although there are some lists that are for users, most are for the developers, and it's easy for users to mistakenly send questions there only to get the infamous "ask questions on the newsgroups" response. My vote would be to change the http://www.eclipse.org/mail/ page into a small page that only shows the generic, non-project lists, and link to it from Community. Project-specific lists would then only be accessible from the project pages. D.
(In reply to comment #3) > My vote would be to change the http://www.eclipse.org/mail/ page into a small > page that only shows the generic, non-project lists, and link to it from > Community. Project-specific lists would then only be accessible from the > project pages. My $0.02's worth is that is this is a tad unreasonable. I've personally never cruised an open source site that didn't somewhere have a list of all the mailing lists. How would you feel about making the mail landing page as you described, but with a link to a full list? And somewhere in there a couple of paragraphs on which channel to use for which types of interactions.
Or perhaps put the lists of general interest up top (e.g. eclipse-announce), make sure that's 'above the fold', and put a denser table with the full listing below. The page is really sparse now. I agree with Mike that the full listing needs to be somewhere accessible on any open source site. People need to be able to go that page and hit Ctrl+F to find lists of interest.
I disagree with comment 4 and comment 5 re: a list of lists "must" be available. http://apache.org/dev/#mail - "Please see each ASF project's websites for more information on what lists they have available." Sourceforge also doesn't have a big list of mailing lists (none that I can find, anyway). One big list doesn't scale when you have a large number of projects. It's my thinking that users don't come to a site looking for mailing lists (or newsgroups for that matter) - they come to a site to learn about topics that interest them. If we guide them to the project pages according to their topic of interest, they can use the resources available on those project pages (newsgroups, CVS, downloads, lists, tutorials, howto's) in ways that the projects intend them to be used. Some projects don't mind user questions on dev lists, some do. > How would you feel about making the mail landing page as you > described, but with a link to a full list? http://www.eclipse.org/mail/ already has all that - lists by topic, lists by project, and all available. It even has a nifty collapse/expand to show the list description, a link to archives, and even a list-specific search, which I think is infinitely cool. Despite that, the "All available" page seems long and hard to use. Perhaps the interface is just cruddy. We could also add an "unsubscribe" link in the expansion. D.
I agree with Denis (comment 6) that there are scaling issues. I would prefere presenting project specific lists at project specific pages. If a project offers a first class user support mailing list it should be promoted on the project homepage. Other projects might opt to reference their committer lists in the committers/contributors section.
I believe Nathan is reworking the Community portal, so I'll mark this as a duplicate of his bug for his consideration. D. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 136420 ***
Moving to Community/Website
